Pages

Sunday 3 April 2016

The Earth's adventures interactive InfoEdugraphic


Hello everybody!

For this task we had to work in groups to create an InfoEduGraphic. The members of my group are: @lainez_ortega@cristinarisueno@GMEstrellaa and @gonzaalo10. To do this we surfed the InfoEduGraphic Project Site to look for tips, instructions and ideas. 

Since all our e-projects (Planets in the Solar SystemThe HydrosphereEnvironmental careThe Mysteries of Earth) are connected with Social Science (planets, Earth, landscapes and so forth), we decided to make an infographic as an introductory tool for a common topic. Our main learning outcome is for our students to know about the planets of the Solar System, The Earth`s layers (Hydrosphere and atmosphere) and landforms as well as environmental care.

First we assigned the roles:

@GMEstrellaa was the coordinator. She had to direct and check that each member did his part of the job. She also encouraged us to keep working on the infographic.
@gonzaalo10 was the supervisor and he was in charge of controlling the creation process and remembering each person's task. They also had to take notes of everybody's ideas. 
@lainez_ortega and @cristinarisueno were the secretaries. They made and create the InfoEduGraphic using Piktochart and Thinglink.
- Finally, I (@celiagon92was the speaker. This is why I am spreading our work by Twitter and through this blog, as well as my classmates ones.

To accomplish this task, we had to face two problems:
  1. How to link all our e-projects' contents: After thinking about it for a while, we decided to structure the infoedugraphic from the most asbtract content (the space) to the most concrete one (landforms). This way, we could include all our Social Science contents in a structured and well-organised way. In order to motivate them, we added a badge that they could get once they finished the learning process.
  2. How to adapt the contents to the different school's levels: this challenge was harder to face but finally we though of making an interactive InfoEduGraphic. What does this mean? We did not only a infographic (which is an image) but also an interactive image. By doing this, we foster an active learning and allow students of different grades to access to different activities of different difficulty. The teacher could guide all this learning process to do the activities corresponding each course.

How did we create our InfoEduGraphic?

We decided to use the tool Piktochart due to the fact that some members of our group had already used it and they said that it could fit the purpose of the project perfectly. It gives you the possibility to create infographics, posters, presentations or reports depending on what we need. The one we chose is an infographic as it is divided into different blocks which were suitable for each difficulty level. The quality of the pictures and icons that the tool offers is quite high and very attractive, exactly what we were looking for: to captivate students’ attention. Finally, we would like to highlight that Picktochart would be perfect if it offered the possibility of making those graphics interactives (pictures with movements, sounds, link to other webpages and so on) instead of being just an image.  

Once we had our infographic finished we went to make it interactive to promote and active learning and to increase pupils' motivation. We did this part of the project using the online tool Thing Link. With this tool you can make an interactive image by putting links in small spots inside your picture. Therefore, we included a video to expand knowledge, interactive activities to review each content and an Arts and Crafts activity about environmental care.
As you can imagine, this tool is inreadibly useful to create you own CLIL materials because, by linking resources, you can work the 4Cs. However, we think this tool would be nicer if it offered a wider variety of forms to insert the links, not only spots. 

From this task, we can conclude that Infographics have a lot of uses in our classrooms. They can be used to introduce content, to review vocabulary, to explain the steps of a process or activity, to help children with special educational needs. Infographics present information in a neat and visual way that can clarify students' doubts.Moreover, students can also create their own infographics to learn about content and ICT skills.

Our final artifact is this amazing interactive InfoEduGraphic to introduce and learn about different contents regarding our planet. Click on the spots to see the activities:



With this artifact, we have taken part in the InfoEdugraphic project and, in return, they sent us this logo:

No comments:

Post a Comment